FIRP – Future Industry Research Programme

Ensuring continuous and responsible innovation while remaining sustainable and competitive is a major challenge for the industry today, which can only be solved through multidisciplinary collaboration between many different stakeholders.The research programme wants to contribute to meeting this major challenge.

FIRP is part of the University’s focus area Smart Cities and Communities and is in line with Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0. This means that the research aims for increased digitisation of industry, while at the same time being socially responsible, sustainable and overall beneficial to society.

FIRP works with five of the Sustainable Development Goals: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; Decent Work and Economic Growth; Sustainable Cities and Communities; Gender Equality; Quality Education; and Responsible Consumption and Production.

The vision of FIRP is to promote research excellence, strengthen university-industry-society cooperation and integrate more research into education to prepare people and industry for future challenges and opportunities. The programme aims to position Halmstad University as a leader in interdisciplinary technological research and help meet modern societal and industrial needs.

Three key themes and clusters

The research programme consists of three collaborative clusters to solve complex industrial challenges. The clusters bring together researchers from disciplines such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, materials and sensors, surface metrology, cybersecurity, additive manufacturing, computer vision, autonomous systems and predictive maintenance

Innovative industry

Is primarily involved in researching and applying cutting-edge technologies and processes across a range of areas of HU strength: semiconductor technology, nanoscience, digital radar systems, sensor systems for autonomous vehicles, functional surfaces and advanced manufacturing techniques.

Resilient Industry

Works with the capacity of industrial sectors to maintain security, reliability, and sustainability amidst the challenges posed by an increasingly digital and interconnected world. This encompasses a broad range of concerns, including cyber security, data privacy and authenticity, resilience to hardware or software failures, and protection against external threats

Predictive industry

Revolves around creating systems capable of autonomous knowledge construction from real-life data generated through interactions between an industrial system and its environment. A central application within Predictive Industry is predictive maintenance (PdM), which aligns with the objective of achieving cost and efficiency gains for industries. This application is tightly connected to the use of HU’s strengths in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Research questions

• How can advanced data analytics and machine learning improve industrial processes?
• What methods and technologies can improve the robustness and security of industrial systems against cyber and physical disruptions?
• How can innovative sensor technologies, materials and surfaces improve industrial capabilities?
• How can predictive models be developed to anticipate equipment failures and optimise operations?

Research projects

AI-Powered Crime Scene Analysis

AIM-TRUE: AI-driven automotive service market – towards more resource-efficient and sustainable vehicle maintenance

Facial Analysis in the Era of Mobile Devices and Face Masks

ELLIIT – Strategic Research Environment

FREEPORT – federated learning and edge processing for safe and efficient operation

Megapixel superlattice detectors with optical metasurfaces

Quantifying Sensor Surface Contamination for Safe Vehicle Automation (QonSense)

ROADVIEW – Robust Automated Driving in Extreme Weather

SMILE IV – safety analysis and verification/validation of machine learning based systems